Amazon is having a feud with Olive, most of their releases have been out of stock for the last month. It's actually been a boon for me finally getting rid of some Olive titles on the Marketplace, though!

NOTE: The Amsterdam segment, A River of Diamonds (directed by Roman Polanski), which was featured in original theatrical release of The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers, has been removed from presentations of the film at the request of the director.

knives wrote:It seems to suggest that it is the uncensored version of the uncensored cut.

If it is, they'd have to have gone back to 35mm basics and rescanned the original neg, as Arrow had to censor their digital master for legal reasons. This isn't normal or desirable practice, obviously, but since even possession of unsimulated bestiality footage is illegal in the UK, they didn't have a choice.

So if they used the Arrow master, it will be the same presentation with the four contentious shots blacked out.

IFC had nothing to do with this package - Olive licensed it directly from Ligia Borowczyk and Argos Films. IFC only ever had the US rights to Immoral Tales and The Beast. I've no idea where the "all but guaranteed to come from Criterion" rumour came from, but then again I've known about the Olive deal for something like two or three years now, so this was clearly never going to happen.

In fact, this is one of the reasons why we crammed as many non-film-specific extras from the big box onto the US editions of Immoral Tales and The Beast as we could - we had to reauthor those discs anyway to remove the original supporting shorts, and we knew that Arrow wouldn't be able to release Blanche et al, so it made sense to port across things like the big Borowczyk interview from that disc.

MichaelB wrote:IFC had nothing to do with this package - Olive licensed it directly from Ligia Borowczyk and Argos Films. IFC only ever had the US rights to Immoral Tales and The Beast. I've no idea where the "all but guaranteed to come from Criterion" rumour came from, but then again I've known about the Olive deal for something like two or three years now, so this was clearly never going to happen.

My apologies, I mixed up the two films that IFC licensed with these Olive titles. Carry on, and ignore my previous post!

I must've been very confused, as it appears Arrow US already released these (IFC's rights were only for streaming then?).

knives wrote:It seems to suggest that it is the uncensored version of the uncensored cut.

If it is, they'd have to have gone back to 35mm basics and rescanned the original neg, as Arrow had to censor their digital master for legal reasons. This isn't normal or desirable practice, obviously, but since even possession of unsimulated bestiality footage is illegal in the UK, they didn't have a choice.

So if they used the Arrow master, it will be the same presentation with the four contentious shots blacked out.

MichaelB wrote:IFC had nothing to do with this package - Olive licensed it directly from Ligia Borowczyk and Argos Films. IFC only ever had the US rights to Immoral Tales and The Beast. I've no idea where the "all but guaranteed to come from Criterion" rumour came from, but then again I've known about the Olive deal for something like two or three years now, so this was clearly never going to happen.

In fact, this is one of the reasons why we crammed as many non-film-specific extras from the big box onto the US editions of Immoral Tales and The Beast as we could - we had to reauthor those discs anyway to remove the original supporting shorts, and we knew that Arrow wouldn't be able to release Blanche et al, so it made sense to port across things like the big Borowczyk interview from that disc.

Though the short in question is the long cut of A Private Collection with a running time of 14:20, we are releasing the censored version in accordance with our licensed material and previously released DVD and Blu-ray versions.

Not remotely surprising. I know bestiality laws vary from state to state, but Olive doesn't strike me as the kind of label who'd be comfortable about distributing such material.

(The four shots in question consist of close-ups of a dog fucking a woman, clearly for real. I was hoping to get away with blurring or pixelation, but the BBFC advised me that this was a legal grey area, so we ended up blacking out the shots altogether so as not to mess up the editing rhythms.)

Well, that's disappointing (but I suppose to be expected). Where are all the hardcore libertarians when one needs them? I certainly sympathise with the view that this sort of unsavoury material is best kept out of the market with no exceptions, but censorship is still censorship and clearly it defeats the director's intention for this (what, century-old?) footage to be blacked out. I guess it's fair to presume now that an uncensored version will never see the light of day.

One thing that's worth bearing in mind is that there's no evidence that Borowczyk ever intended this version of the film to get commercial distribution - it was made purely to shock film festival audiences.

He knew perfectly well that it was most likely legally undistributable, which is why he not only made two versions but planned from the outset that this would be the case (since in some cases he shot different versions of various shots - for instance, thumbs obscuring forbidden body parts that are fully exposed in the longer cut).

This reminds me of an infamous event from the Giornate del Cinema Muto, when several patrons fled a late-night screening of some vintage pornographic films (the exact contents of the screening were unadvertised) when one of the films featured a woman—how shall I put this?—fucking a duck.